The Game (16 page)

She shifted her body, and the lights all ran together inside her head, white.

T
HEN
, suddenly, the thaw came. All night sections of the roof-load of snow cracked away, gathered momentum, buckled at the gutter, and splatted into paths and garden. Snow in the flowerbeds filmed over with deepening water, and in the morning lawns were spattered with black dots across the white – like fruit cake under icing. Elizabeth Corbett said they must all leave before floods in their turn detained them. Thor concurred and rang the station. That evening, they packed.

Cassandra was packing when Julia found her. Her bed was strewn with apparently identical black garments rolled into long tubes. On the dressing-table was a pile of jewels, ready to be put in tissue paper and chamois: chains, brooches, rings, lumps of unset stone. There was a strong smell of leather and old books; Julia thought she must be imagining the hint of incense. She herself, in hooded and fringed Scandinavian jersey, purple clocked with black and olive, over purple tights and pointed purple suède boots, fitted the picture indifferently well. She thought: it’s ironic that what Thor gives me can so easily be worn to suit Cassandra. She closed the door behind her.

‘May I come in?’

‘As usual, you ask for what you have accomplished. Clear yourself a chair, sit down.’

Julia moved from Cassandra’s round, carved wood and plum velvet chair what looked like a spencer and a pair of knee-length knitted woollen knickers, the elastic broken and knotted in two places. She sat down, and said, folding these garments, ‘It must be draughty in your college.’

‘It is.’

Cassandra began to roll the jewels into little balls of tissue paper.

‘But you’ll be glad to get back?’

‘One comes to need one’s own routine.’

‘If Thor had his way we’d be breaking right out of ours. Into a new life. Cass, you don’t think I was wrong about that, do you?’

Cassandra hesitated perceptibly. She said, ‘No,’ and then, ‘does he?’

‘I don’t honestly know what he thinks. Sometimes I even think he only brought it up at all to call my bluff.’

She watched Cassandra’s mouth compress, and the thought on Cassandra’s face: Julia in a confessional mood. However Cassandra said, surprisingly, ‘What bluff?’

‘Well – I write these books. About people confined in a domestic pressure-chamber. Needing an outburst, a whole-hearted gesture, some sort of extravagance or violence.…’

Cassandra did not say whether she read the books.

‘And you think he wants you to know you’re not the only one.’

‘Well, it might be that.’

‘Or it might be genuine concern with non-domestic problems.’

Cassandra lugged out a suitcase from under the bed and began to push rolled-up stockings and handkerchiefs into her shoes, as she had done when they left for school.

‘He’s been funny since we got here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. He’s cold. He
resents
all sorts of things about me lately. But he ought to have known what I – was like.’

‘Perhaps he thought you might change.’

Julia took this. ‘Oh yes, he did. So did I. But it’s him that’s changed. He – I –

‘Changed?’

‘Well, when I married him he seemed safe. And concerned with real things. After living here. I wanted a real life of my own. He seemed so
normal.’

‘He’s a little like Father,’ said Cassandra. ‘Of course, nobody is as much like anyone else as one initially thinks they may be.’

‘That’s clever of you. Yes, he wants to understand, and he’s limited by his own goodness. He can’t really think ill of you, or get impatient, or understand meanness intuitively. I used to think that was marvellous. Real wisdom I’d live up to, in time.”

‘And now?’

‘Now he frightens me. And I understand better. He is – sexually rather constrained, you know, and makes it – made it, when he was younger – worse, by keeping his distance. He never knew enough to take it easy. So when we met – and I know I do rather throw myself at people, though I try not to because it always causes trouble’ – Julia hurried on – ‘he – he felt violently attracted, and took this as a sign from God that he was in love. No, don’t grin, he did think that, he told me so. Damn it,’ said Julia, ‘he always
looks
as though he knows what he’s doing.’

Cassandra, slightly unnerved by these near-revelations of what went on in the marriage bed, both pruriently curious and instinctively afraid of learning more, made a non-committal noise and busied herself with a jar of cold cream and a bottle of lavender water.

‘I wasn’t up to it. For all sorts of reasons I wasn’t up to it. I – I cheated him. I wasn’t what he expected. I’m not – like that, I – didn’t know I wasn’t, either. Now he goes about behaving like a frustrated saint. Well, he may be, but it’s not only the saint.… In any case, he seems to think everything’s my fault.’

Cassandra came sideways round the bed foot and gathered up an armful of what looked like bandages.

‘He blames some of it on me,’ Cassandra said. ‘He told me so. Over the television.’

‘But I never see you or think about you,’ said Julia with automatic and patent untruth.

‘He asked me if I hadn’t done enough damage.’ They thought this over, in silence, and then looked at each other with curious complicity; Cassandra finished, smoothly, ‘I didn’t know precisely what he meant.’

‘Coming back here does bring things up. Old fears. I feel everyone’s against me. I feel everyone thinks I’m a fool. Everything matters too much. It’s suffocating.’

‘That’s natural.’

‘Oh, do you think so? I think
he
thinks we’re unnatural, that there’s something really wrong with us. That we’re abnormal. Trapped.’

‘You always worried obsessively about what was natural, or normal. You may well be normal. I don’t suppose many people would describe me so. I can’t say it worries me.’

‘There you go, dismissing me again.’

‘I’m not dismissing you.’

‘You always have. I – I meant to stop that. I meant to shock you, to make you see I could.…’ She took off several rings, dropped one on the carpet, and got down. From under the chair her voice went on, ‘That isn’t to say that’s what I still want, but the idea crops up from time to time. All my childhood’ – accusing, offering, struggling to her knees – ‘I meant simply to catch up and do something that would stagger you, that would make you admire me. And then we could have been friends. Well, we made a nice mess of it. Between us and Simon.’

Cassandra went over to the window-seat. She began to roll up the oilskin and tie up papers in taped bundles.

‘What are you doing with that?’

‘Putting it away.’ She grinned, briefly. ‘It’s done enough damage.’

‘Damage to you?’

‘Not exactly. I wasn’t thinking of that. I’ve made a life out of it, in a way.’

‘No, but, Cass, is that what you
wanted?
Is that all you wanted?’

‘Not all, no.’

‘You should have written,’ Julia cried, with love, with pity, with the old admiration, with a furious sense of the openness to mockery of the spencer and the knitted knickers. Cassandra, hurt by the unquestioning past tense leaned over
the window-seat and snapped an elastic band round the shoe box of plaster figures.

‘Oh, what did it come to, all the life we had then, Cassandra? Aren’t you appalled that nothing we can do now can possibly measure up to the – the sheer urgency, and beauty and importance of all – all we imagined? I didn’t mean to write the sort of stuff I write. And I don’t suppose you meant – Don’t you feel you’ve been shut out of something? Don’t you hanker? I hanker. A lot of the time.’

The question was disingenuous. Julia knew that Cassandra, in her draughty college, felt like Charlotte Brontë, cut off from Branwell and Zamorna, like Emily, silently pining for another world. She knew, too, that Cassandra, like herself, had been reliving large parts of the past. She was still surprised when Cassandra spoke.

‘Shut out of Eden with the flaming sword across the gate? Oh, yes, I hanker. As you put it. But I think we should not.’ Her voice was dry and pedantic; they were back where they had begun and Cassandra was lecturing. ‘Don’t you think we were illegitimately appropriating to ourselves experience of a kind and intensity we had no right to? I think this was partly because of our background. The whole Quaker tradition emphasizes the practical at the expense of the imaginative – unless, of course, you include the experience of the Inner Light as an imaginative experience. It could be, but it isn’t; that light which lights up and transfigures the real world. But Quakers – historically – solidified into a preoccupation with the real world, with action, with altering things. Father was the tail-end of that tradition. We belong to the decadence. What with the literary emphasis of liberal education as it now is, and servants’ gossip, and Inge’s stories, and the constant flooding outwards and dissipation of the concept of tolerance – oh, we were far enough away from the days when music and painting were wicked, and romances were lies.

‘So you and I created a world, we explored, in the imagination, things that were deficient in our experience. A normal procedure, I assume, only we carried it beyond the point
where it was normal. There was a gulf between the life we created and the life we lived. I had hoped to be able to bridge it, in time.’ She paused. ‘You were right to want to be normal. You should never have let me mock you. It ought to be possible for you, now, to find your daily life real, and full enough?’

‘All I do is turn my daily life into imaginary books.’

‘You know, Julia,’ said Cassandra, ‘I think perhaps one should make a real moral effort to forgo one’s need for a sense of glory.’

She talks a kind of mad shorthand, Julia thought, which I understand because I share it.

‘We ought to see things duller, flatter, more on the surface.’

‘What things? No, Cass, life ought surely
not
to be on the surface.’

‘I think I meant we ought to see each other so. I was thinking of what your husband said.’

Julia could not find an opening to mention Simon. She said, ‘You mean, it would be better for us to be ordinary friends.’

‘I’m not blessed with your capacity for friendship. But yes, something like that.’

They were silent. Julia was surprised, and moved, that Cassandra had made such an effort to communicate: Thor must have had more effect on her than she bargained for. She thought that Cassandra was much worse off than she was; attachment to the Game had betrayed Cassandra into a bleak enough solitude. All the same, she felt a little flicker of irrational envy; Cassandra had appropriated their world, taken it over, turned in on herself. She could afford to be kind to Julia because she had at last efficiently shut her out. Cassandra, frowning, packed the papers together with dusty hands. Then she brushed these against each other, closed the windowseat and sat down on it.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘We ought to see more of each other. We ought – we ought to get used to each other, oh, I do agree. Neither of us is a
monster. It’s all been rather silly. And it’s still true I can talk better to you than to anyone – this is a real talk we’ve just had, the first I’ve had for ages. We ought to have grown out of – all that other.’

‘Yes.’ Cassandra felt tired; she recognized in herself a feeling, familiar enough, that Julia, present, was not formidable, was even likeable.

‘Why don’t I come and look you up in Oxford? We could do some sight-seeing together. And have nice normal cups of tea.’

Julia felt splendidly that she was at last knitting up a rent that ran across the whole web of her life. And Cassandra smiled, briefly. ‘If you can find the time, I’d like that,’ she said. She looked round her room. ‘Have a cigarette,’ she said, repeating, belatedly, her gesture to Deborah. Julia accepted, smiling; they could pick up where they had left off at school. They could face each other and grow. They would diminish, in each other’s mind, to manageable proportions.

Cassandra went to bed congratulating herself on having at least made some effort to pay the debt she owed to the pale Scandinavian. She had tried, because of what he had said, to face a fact, and found it now rather exhausting. Like Julia, she had felt unable to mention Simon, who had been, she thought, in many ways just another piece in the Looking-Glass chess game whose moves and maps had been laid out long before his arrival. He had a real existence of his own, but it did not, whatever she had hoped or wanted, concern her. He was far enough away, now. Whereas Julia was at hand. One should live in the real world, she told herself, getting into bed.

That night she had again one of the recurrent nightmares that had begun shortly after Simon’s departure, when he might have been supposed to have left the country, and had continued with varying frequency. From these dreams she always woke changed – relieved, informed, moved, afraid, not the same woman who had put her head on the pillow. Considerable moral and emotional effort went into undoing
them, into persuading herself that nothing had happened or would happen. They were so vivid and bright.

They always began with herself walking through some foreign landscape, in brilliant sunlight, in an impossible clarity – over prairie grass, over desert, through jungle creepers, along tropical beaches. They had that obsessive visual detail that was part of Cassandra. Over the months, over the years, she had studied a whole flora and fauna. She held tiny birds and remembered the cold, twig-like texture of their pink legs, the clutch of tiny claws, the area of blue, fragile skin around golden eyes, and needle-fine black beaks. One night she walked over a sandy wood floor beneath a whole flock of roosting birds the size of terriers, whose purple and gold plumage dangled from bulky pillow-case-like bodies, and, swaying between branches, brushed her hair. Another night a whole field of grass was alive with elongated, hurrying creatures, a cross between rats and lizards, with black snouts and tiny blood-red hands.

In the early stages, she had a sense of largeness. Landscape, forms of life, were capable of infinite extension. Warmth and light invaded her, like the aura of a migraine.